Beyond the Basics: 9 Advanced WordPress Features for Power Users

The transition from a WordPress user to a WordPress specialist is defined by one thing: control.

While the average user is dependent on the limitations of their theme or the settings of a plugin, the developer manipulates the underlying engine to suit their specific needs.

To master WordPress at a higher level, you’d want to be exposed to how WordPress works, it’s most advanced functions, and how to integrate it with other applications & infrastructure.

Here is a primer into nine advanced WordPress features to get started.

Most WordPress users know that the default installation of WordPress can be quite limiting – with only the standard posts, pages, categories, etc to work with, trying to build any segmentation, workflows, or automation is simply not possible out of the box.

Advanced Custom Fields takes your site to the next level. It acts as the bridge between “standard content” and “structured data”, allowing you to set data variables which can be replicated across hundreds of pages instantly.

This ensures data consistency & integrity and allows you to display that data anywhere on the site using dynamic data fields. Build & manage WordPress sites in a truly scalable way after you get acquainted with this skill.

One of the advanced WordPress features which provide the most time leverage is its templating function. Whether you’re using Elementor, Divi, Visual Composer, or Breakdance, templates are a common function available in WordPress builders.

Imagine this – having the ability to direct & render data from hundreds of pages all in one single chosen page design. One edit made, and all 100 pages follow your instruction.

No longer do you need to spend hours micro-managing hundreds of page designs & inputs.

Understanding its hierarchy is what allows you to create surgical design & template changes. WordPress follows a “waterfall” logic to decide which file/data to use for a specific page.

Having & working with a decent web builder is all well & good, but even having basic knowledge of front end languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript can really open up a new playing field for web development.

Although WordPress is built on PHP, it still renders out code on browsers with front end languages. Knowing some basics gives you “tools” to not have to rely 100% on website builders for designs and edits.

Augment your website’s look & feel by tapping into CSS & JavaScript, and even give it new features like dropdown options & elements that work for you. While not as inbuilt as some advanced WordPress features, its still pretty easy to implement in your website!

Go deep enough and you can even integrate libraries like React, Tailwind, and others to boost your website’s form. Remember to add the CSS code in a CSS classes file which can be accessed across the site!

Speed is no longer just about user experience; it is a core SEO ranking factor. Lets crack down on the basics.

On-page optimization. The goal here is to reduce the “weight” of your page so the browser can render it faster. Use next-gen image formats like WebP or AVIF. Implement Lazy Loading so images only load as the user scrolls down.

Ensure critical CSS loads first, while non-essential JavaScript is “deferred” or loaded “asynchronously” so it doesn’t delay the page load.

Caching stores copies of your files so the server doesn’t have to “rebuild” the page every time a visitor clicks.

Set up caching function on your website’s admin panel to allow guests to receive a cached copy upon request, while allowing the remainder of the page to update via JavaScript. Tap on object cache to speed up processing time for database queries too.

Server. The engine. Even the cleanest code will lag on a slow server. Physical distance matters. Choose a data centre close to your primary audience to reduce latency. Ensure your host provides enough RAM and CPU. If you’re on shared hosting, a single heavy user on the same IP can hog resources and slow you down.

Ideally, you’d want to have a dedicated fixed IP for your site so that traffic doesn’t need to go through multiple hops to reach the server.

Because WordPress powers over 43% of all websites on the internet, its sheer popularity makes it an attractive target for hackers.

It isn’t that WordPress is “weak” by design, but rather that its huge market share makes it a high-frequency target for bots & automated scripts (many hackers use bots to look for weak points in your website).

When it comes to website security, some best practices to follow would be; use Wordfence or WP 2FA to provide Multi-factor Authentication. This protects against brute-force attacks and ensures only someone with an approved physical device can log in to access your admin panel and effect changes.

Remove unused plugins. Every plugin if not properly updated, is essentially an entry point into your backend system. The main culprits are input & submit fields which if not properly tested, can send malicious JavaScript code from the front end to your server.

Web application firewalls like Cloudflare or Sucuri can offer even greater perimeter protection in the form of traffic filtering and malware scanning, giving your website much needed protection against DDoS attacks, offering IP cloaking, & seeking out malicious code installs.

Finally, backups. Always use a backup function such as All-in-one WP migration or a backup service from your hosting provider to create and store backups of the current website files. This is the nuclear option should your site get hit by an unrecoverable security incident.

You don’t need to be a software engineer, but you might be comfortable reading and writing basic PHP. This allows you to stop installing “utility” plugins and gives you straightforward solutions should you wish to implement simple logic in your WordPress site.

Unlike frontend languages like CSS and HTML, which your browser interprets, PHP is a server-side language.

When a visitor requests a page, the server runs the PHP code first. It compiles & assembles the data that makes up your page, and then sends a finished HTML package to the user’s browser. The visitor never sees your actual PHP code — only the result.

If you’re savvy enough, try picking it up! Simply learning basic variables, operators, data types, and functions can allow you to cover many of the simple functions for your website like conditional logic, custom redirects, and automated tasks.

Important – When just starting out, always use a plugin like Code Snippets to insert PHP code.

This allows for easy management and deletion, and ensures that if you make a mistake, your entire site doesn’t go down, and your custom code won’t be deleted when WordPress updates.

Although WordPress might look like a simple website on the outside, but under the hood, it’s actually a pretty sophisticated open-source application. One of its most powerful features is the REST API, which comes “out of the box” with every updated installation.

REST APIs provides a way for external applications to interact with your site. Instead of loading a full webpage, an app can ask WordPress for just the data alone, which is given in JSON format.

For those who play frequently with WordPress and APIs, this makes it easy to connect data to external applications like CRMs, email marketing, and even headless frontends or custom dashboards.

This allows power users to tap on the content management system of WordPress with a more fluent frontend stack.

For most modern WordPress sites (which use permalinks like /post-name/), the base URL for the REST API is: https://yourdomain.com/wp-json/. From there, you append the namespace and resource to that base URL to access it.

Heatmaps such as Hotjar & Clarity are great tools to allow you to see recorded first-hand visitor activity on your website or online store.

Apart from just showing how the user navigates the site, it also provides insights into duration of visit, which URL the visitor came from (great for marketing tracking), and also highlight “hot” engagement areas where site visitors tend to click and navigate.

As advanced WordPress features, heatmaps really do bring a level of credibility to your website’s performance. You’re literally seeing how users read and manoeuvrer through your platform. No more guesswork involved.

Use heatmap tools to confirm perceptions, analyse various types of user behaviour, and optimize your site for performance with this newfound knowledge.

Being the main digital front of your company, your website produces a mountain of useful data every day. However, data is useless if it isn’t tracked and analysed.

An easy way to install & manage the various tracking snippets from Meta and Google is to simply use Google Tag Manager. It’s a free google application that allows you to consolidate & attach data tracking code to your website in a much smaller container.

GTM tags load asynchronously. This means the tracking scripts won’t “block” your website’s visual elements from loading first, improving your page speed score.

In its simplest form of use, GTM allows tracking of general use data for ad campaigns and marketing. But for experienced practitioners, you can setup very specific tags and triggers that fire only when a user clicks a specific link or loads a certain page.

Combine this ability with the custom conversion metrics of paid ads to get a true top-down view of what’s actually working, instead of guessing in the dark.

GTM even supports debugging with a “Preview Mode” that allows you to test if your tags are working correctly before you push them live to the public.

While some of the above mentioned advanced WordPress features can be picked up in a couple days, others will definitely need a few weeks to get a grip on.

Coming from the view of a web developer, I can definitely say for sure that these skillsets help a lot if your day-to-day involves the management of websites.

You might even be hooked into delving deeper into the WordPress ecosystem like me too.